Recent posts by estava on Kongregate

I finally did it and have a team of 9 stars heroes which are all above level 160.

The way I did it was by saving enough Honor Badges and by providing the main heroes with as much exp as possible.

Good sources of Honor Badges are guild boss fights, expeditions if we can clear lots of stages, top 100 rank at arena when we could try to double the Honor Badge we get at arena, quests twice a day, hero trials…

Good sources of exp are quests books, dungeons, Here Be Monsters defenses without a lot of garrison in towers, and try not to leave your main heroes level capped when they cannot gain more exp…

Next up for me will be to start leveling my new Aries hero and perhaps use some Honor Badges on my Snowzilla which is still at level 80. I just could not afford all the Honor Badges to upgrade him before.

I am still playing it and they have yet to break those corners or any wall at all.

The thing is, it’s important that what is inside the core is not too large. Otherwise with too extended walls the monsters would want to go inside, and triple walls would be a better counter against those. As example are those large deathbox designs.

But my design is pretty small. Same buildings found in a Peon Clover design only. Some players continue to use those same number of buildings inside for a while and they may use about the same design.

From these designs the next step would be a Diamond design around town hall level 14.

Nyan, I did test the defenses. They don’t break the walls at the corners at all. They haven’t broken the walls a single time since I started using those defenses. I think the game’s algorithms consider those corners to be double layer.

Hi folks, I’ve recently started to play the game on a tablet starting from scratch again so I had the chance to try some defense ideas for the early levels. I came up with a couple of defenses I think are good enough to recommend to others.

HBM A

I started using this defense as early as town hall level 7. Then I kept adding new buildings as they became available, but I tried to maintain the general idea of the defense. It worked well for HBM A as I was winning it nearly always after a while. As the buildings outside become stronger, we may need to move to a different defense or remove troops from the camps so no enemies become stuck on the buildings outside.

HBM B

For HBM B I had to change it quite a bit. I wanted to move the extra heroes inside together with the extra tower. So I expanded the core by a bit when I got to town hall 11. But I found the buildings at the corners were not good, because the enemies would pick up the target of my heroes — my heroes would chase the tower monsters coming inside, and the enemies would be done with the buildings outside before my heroes had come to safety inside. I came up with those 2 groups of buildings outside instead.

Next I found out that I really needed the Cannon tower, because the archers and pyromancers of B5 were too many and they were killing me a lot.

Preferred Heroes

I have tested heroes like Marksman, Engineer, Alchemist, Serpent Queen… But even with heroes like Engineer and Serpent Queen that can hit many enemies at a time, I could not kill all the enemies quickly enough without the backup of a Cannon tower on HBM B. On HBM A we don’t have to deal with so many enemies at a time, so nearly anything may work well on HBM A.

I really liked those heroes. I bought most of them with just shards that I was farming more easily thanks to those defenses and for looting elite dungeons. So my advice would be to get them with shards and perhaps get 4 builders with the gems right away. We can advance so quickly that way. My towers are getting to level 4 in advanced upgrades and my town hall is being upgraded to level 12 and I’m not even playing it that much. I’ve only played it for a week so far on that account.

Peon Clover comparison

Before these tests I would always tell people to try to start with the Peon Clover design. But now I think these defenses may be better. The Peon Clover has 4 entrances. My defenses have only 2 so enemies may walk longer to get into it and the traps can be more concentrated.

Hero Trials

For Hero Trials L1 I would take defense for HBM A over the one for HBM B. The reason is that enemy heroes enjoy too much time outside on the buildings of HBM B. Heroes like Thunder God can wreck a lot like that. Or maybe use the one for HBM B and make the 4 groups of buildings at the corners still. :-)

Our game doesn’t favor defenses a lot. Heroes may grow stronger than defenses. Spells help to give heroes some more protection. And with strong heroes, we may even be able to choose whether to also use troops or not.

With that being said, there is something that defenses can do that will always help. Higher level towers with garrison will cause a lot of problem to attacking heroes.

At the beginning it’s not obvious that towers can help with defense. The heroes come with a lot of health and the towers can barely do any damage to them. It’s when the towers get upgraded to Arrow Towers and get further upgraded and get garrison that they start to cause problems to heroes. Even other towers like the Magic tower, if upgraded and with garrison, they too can cause a lot of trouble to heroes. We mostly settle on only Arrow towers though. Since they hit the hardest and with purple garrison can do double or triple damage to heroes.

Once we start using better defenses for Here Be Monsters, the towers start to become more useful for defense. With a combination of green + purple garrison, Arrow towers can protect a wider area, so even buildings that are put a little farther from the core defense can still be protected by the towers.

Heroes like the Vlad Dracula that just fly over the walls can be very hard to counter with just walls. I find for example that I can attack Diamond types of defenses with the Vlad Dracula very well, since the Vlad Dracula can fly over one of the tips of the defense and have enough time to deal with the first towers and heroes there. Lately during expeditions I have even preferred to start the fights with only flying heroes like the Vlad and the Druid as a healer. I wait to use heroes like Immortep and Thunder God. The point is that without good towers to annoy the Vlad, the defense loss can be almost assured.

So, unfortunately, I think that towers need to be upgraded to max level for a better defense. And they also need to have good purple and green garrisons. It’s unfortunate because it takes a long time to upgrade the towers, and we still need to focus on developing other parts of the castle for like the 6th hero base, higher level town halls and vaults…

With developed towers and garrison, your defense will not depend so much on your own heroes to counter the enemy heroes.

Something else that you can do to try to confuse the attackers is to have a ring of buildings outside your core defense. Since many people already use some kind of HBM defense that has a strong core, they may just sprinkle buildings outside to create that ring. Then if the enemy heroes split into groups outside or your towers can do enough damage to them, your defense may be able to fair better. The only trouble is that it may not be enough to stop a party of 6 enemy heroes. Nothing may be able to stop a strong party of 6 enemy heroes, though. That’s why for my own defense, I prefer to just use an anti-Hero Trials defense by default than to try to come up with an anti-raid defense. But my Arrow towers are finishing upgrading to level 10 now, and only the very best attackers may be able to get past them if they had proper garrison.

Atlanticore

It seems that I like these unusual heroes such as the Atlanticore, right? :-)

What I learned at the beginning was that the Atlanticore was not a necessary hero. That we should have prioritized other heroes first, instead. But the Atlanticore was one of those scary-looking heroes other people would hire. And I did think about buying one with shards if I had a spot for one on the team. Luckily, I ended up rolling one with gems, so I didn’t have to feel dumb for buying an Atlanticore. :-)

But even when I hired an Atlanticore, I didn’t have room for him on the team. My team was already filled up with Druid, Thunder God, Immortep, Champion and Grizzly Reaper. The plan then was to wait till I had 6 hero bases, and if I hadn’t hired a better hero until then, I would use the Atlanticore as the 6th hero on the team.

If I were to invest Honor Badges on the Atlanticore, I also wanted the right talent on him. At least a good talent to start with. So I rolled several times for talent and I ended up getting Revitalize 3/5 on the Atlanticore. It was one of those lucky moments! Then I made the decision that I would invest into him further. I started leveling him up and also upgraded his skill to 5/9.

But I still didn’t have a spot for him on the team, but since at the arena we can use 6 heroes, I was using him at the arena at least.

Arena

And the arena is indeed the best place to use the Atlanticore at. I’m now a top 100 player at the arena, and one of the reasons I can beat a lot of stronger opponents there is that the Atlanticore can tank extremely well, against even Archdukes. I am just a Lord. So the title difference is great and often it’s the Atlanticore that buys the other heroes enough time.

The Atlanticore is a great counter against teams led by Pumpkin Dukes. And the arena is full of those. The PD makes the enemies to attack much faster and they run into the Atlanticore’s shield killing most of them in the process. :-)

The problem is that the Atlanticore needs to activate the shield soon enough. So I put him at the front so enemies target him and he gets more energy for the skill sooner. That’s why the Revitalize talent is important. I think a minimum of 3/5 Revitalize makes a huge difference.

I hear that further up the arena rank it may get much harder and the Atlanticore may lose usefulness. By then, hiring other great heroes that can be even better than the Atlanticore is already something that is extraordinarily difficult. Think for example about teams led by Aries with Revitalize 5/5. Those can be extremely scary. For most of us though, just having enough fun is all that we can ask for. I never planned to get that high up at arena. It just happened. :-)

Raids

The Atlanticore is bad for raids, I’m afraid. When we lose badly, we have to find someone to put the blame on. And I have put the blame on the Atlanticore a few times. :-)

Boss

I think the Atlanticore is bad for boss. Although I haven’t used him much for boss at all. But at boss we often want heroes other than just tanks.

Overall

The Atlanticore is good for Arena. It’s not a priority hero though. If you happen to roll a Revitalize talent that you have no use for, hiring the Atlanticore then just for that talent could be a good idea.

Did you know we can get the 6th hero base eventually? It only takes a few months and 20 buildings upgraded to level 16. Then we can do something like fight the boss with 6 heroes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOjkENpLQv4

I got my 6th hero base earlier today. And I’ve had quite a bit of fun since, trying to see what improvements it would bring. I recorded the videos so others could also see what they could get if they tried to get their 6th hero base too.

It took me 4 months and 12 days to get all that was needed for the 6th hero base. Because we need these minimum requirements: TH level 14, 4 Mana Mills level 16, 4 Gold Mines level 16, 4 Camps level 16, 4 Gold Vaults level 16 and 4 Mana Vaults level 16. Or 20 buildings that need to be at least level 16.

With 6 heroes I could also raid more easily. For hero trials maybe it hasn’t made too much of a difference yet.

For boss I’m now able to do 35m damage in total, which gives max rewards. In many single runs I am able to do about 2m damage. All of that and I don’t even have the Pumpkin Duke which helps a lot more during boss.

I am also able to farm the 40 shards dungeon without even using a powerful spell like the Ares Frenzy. It’s true that I have a couple of strong heroes on the team, though, Vlad Dracula and Cupid. But if a hero dies, I may replace them with one of the heroes I keep in tower garrison and hit the dungeon again. :-)

If you want to get your 6th hero base, try to get 5 builders. Otherwise it might take a while longer.

I want to contribute more to the topic. So I will try to describe what I like about some of my heroes so you can better decide what heroes to go for.

I will start with the Grizzly Reaper.

I hired the Grizzly Reaper after I had hired heroes like Thunder God (with shards), Immortep (with shards), Champion (with gem roll)… The Grizzly Reaper just wasn’t like some of those. When people talked about the Grizzly Reaper, they talked like he was efficient for raids and sometimes very high level Here Be Monster (HBM) stages. But I wanted heroes for earlier levels of HBM…

I also heard that the Grizzly Reaper needed to have the skill upgraded to level 7 to really shine. Whereas other heroes wouldn’t have needed to have their skills upgraded that much to start being really useful.

One problem of hiring the Grizzly Reaper first is having to spend a lot of shards on him to get his skill upgraded to level 7. If we do that, other heroes may not join our team until much later. Which would make farming shards even harder.

At skill level 7, the Grizzly Reaper is able to target 5 enemies at a time with the skill. That will help him to get rid of troops in camps and enemy heroes much quicker. If the camps are empty, the Reaper can just get rid of the enemy heroes much quicker then. I have even recorded a video showing the Grizzly Reaper doing a solo raid here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRhRM269UEY

Raids and Expeditions

During raids and expeditions, if the defense has empty camps or has camps that can be quickly emptied, the Reaper can help with the next step which is getting rid of the enemy heroes in a safe manner. Some people may get creative with how they try for a quick raid, but the Reaper makes some of those raids much easier by himself.

When I’m doing expeditions, if I still have the Grizzly Reaper, I know I can still try for something till the end.

It doesn’t always work though. When the defense has a nice ring of buildings outside with great garrison towers or the defense is super tight with little room for my heroes, I may just drop all my heroes together and hope for the best. Then the Reaper may not be as good.

Arena

I also use the Reaper for arena. He always lasted a lot there, since he can heal and stays behind other heroes. He also combined strength with other heroes that targeted several enemies at a time to help with getting rid of enemies behind the tank lines. :-)

Boss

During Boss fights, the Reaper is not as good. He does do damage till the end, but the skill doesn’t contribute as much there.

Here Be Monsters

During HBM, he is a camper. When my heroes wouldn’t last as much, the Grizzly Reaper would stick around, at least until a tower was down in the diamond defense. His rapid fire and ability to kill several enemies, while staying healed up, and including his range 1 attacking, meant the Grizzly Reaper would just do his job.

Torch Battles

The Reaper is my go to hero when I need to guard against a powerful enemy hero. The fact that he will just do a great amount of damage quickly may be enough to beat other heroes to the punch.

Overall

The Grizzly Reaper is a great hero to have. But the costs to upgrade his skill to level 7 may be an issue. It is worth the effort in the mid to long run.

I’ve been lucky enough to have played with many heroes by now, as you can see in the screenshot of my team:

I started like most people. I didn’t have great heroes at the beginning. And the only way I could get my heroes was by buying them with shards. Eventually I started getting lucky, but at first I just got more heroes that I could have gotten with shards, like the Champion and the Succubus. It was a good thing that I got the Champion relatively early with gem rolls, since I wasn’t planning on buying him, but he became a hero that I learned to appreciate.

Of the heroes we can get with shards, I’m only really missing the Ninja. I don’t plan on getting him or playing with him, ever, I guess. :-)

Hero Skill

Heroes come with unique skills. Since not all heroes can be great, what really makes some heroes that much more powerful is first and foremost their skills.

Skills that help with killing, stunning, healing, buffing, debuffing… But some skills are just too weak to matter much. Skills that just seek to increase stats or are too specialized may end up finding little use and their heroes may never get played with.

Skills that have multipurpose, that can do more than one of killing, stunning, healing, buffing, debuffing, those are the skills that are a pretty big deal. It’s not a coincidence that some of the top heroes have multipurpose skills.

Skills can be upgraded by consuming other heroes and sacrifice heroes. Skills have their own experience points, and different heroes when consumed give different amounts of experience points to the hero’s skill.

Talent

Heroes also have talents that are randomly given to them at the beginning. Talents are very important, but not on the same level of skills. Talents can make a huge difference for the hero, depending on the use case.

While skills are more active and need energy to be triggered, talents are mostly passive. Talents may give the hero more stats, increase damage by a percentage, increase the skill energy levels at the beginning, or even help the hero with healing.

Talents cannot be upgraded like Skills, with experience points. But Talents can be sort of upgraded by just giving the hero another talent that is better. It costs 300 gems or 1 talent refresh card to reroll a talent. Then the talent can be given to any hero you want.

As talents are more useful on some heroes than on others, it’s important to try to give the right kind of talent to your heroes. A good hero with a bad talent may not be able to enjoy its full power. And trying to improve the talents of heroes is an ongoing challenge.

Most talents come with just level 1 or level 2. Finding a talent level 3, 4 or 5 is difficult enough. And finding the right talent your hero needs is even more difficult. We may need as much luck to get the right talent on a good hero as we may have needed to hire the hero in the first place.

Health

Having enough health is important so heroes can wait to be healed by the Druid or spells. One way to give heroes more health is just by leveling up the hero. The hero will gain a little more health with every level up. And every 20 levels the hero will gain a bunch of health based on the amount of health the hero had on level 1.

To have some balance, heroes that are great offensively may be given little health. The problem is that the hero will seem to die more often as a result, despite the hero being very good otherwise.

Depending on the challenge, the hero may never seem to have enough health to carry them on. During a boss fight, for example, the boss may do a massive 16,000 damage to all heroes on the field. Most heroes, ordinary, elite and even some legendary ones, may not be able to survive it. Heroes that have a lot of health may be able to survive a couple of those strikes.

My hero won but the enemy kept coming – Glitch

Sometimes that happens. I have seen some people suggest that some heroes when used for guarding may cause that glitch. I don’t know why that happens. But I for example don’t use my Immortep, Vlad Dracula or Snowzilla for guarding. Other heroes may also run into this glitch. I still use them for hauling, though! :-)

The hero’s movement speed affects hauling time

Heroes that have a faster movement speed will be able to haul in less time. Higher level heroes gain more movement speed and will haul faster. And some heroes like the Ninja are fast by default and will haul in record time, giving less time to the guild to guard against it.

Last hour frenzy

During the last hour of Torch Battles things tend to go mad. Up until the last seconds. Some weaker guilds may try to cause top guilds some trouble at the end. Some players try to play only at the end and will save almost all their hauling and guarding tries for the end. It could be too late by then, though.

Sending all the hauls you can with 12 minutes remaining is a good idea. Even slow heroes will finish on time then. And as your heroes score points at the end, they could help to offset the points being stolen by others at the very end during which guarding may be impossible as you run out of tries and time.

Torch Battles are events held every Wednesday and Saturday for the top 3,000 guilds. The events last 11 hours and start at 10:00 server time on those days. The challenge is to see whether your guild can score maximum points for maximum rewards. The rewards are precious Honor Badges (HBs) and Shards.

First, the 3,000 guilds are distributed into 10 groups, with strong and weak guilds being equally distributed among the groups. Every group will have some strong guilds who will try very hard to maintain the perfect score. The ranking of torch battles will show the scores of the 300 guilds in that group, with live changes indicating whether the guilds have at least a certain percentage of points. They could show 25%, 50%, 75% or 100% points. And every half hour or so the ranking positions could change based on how well the guilds did in that time. With the best guilds rising to the top 10 and becoming easily visible for others to try and challenge them.

To score points, the guilds need to haul flags or points from other guilds. At the beginning, all guilds start with half of the points based on their guild levels. Higher level guilds have a greater range of points. At the end of the event some guilds will be left with 0 points as all of their points get stolen by other guilds.

But guilds can try to defend their points by guarding them from being hauled or stolen. When enemies come, they will take about 7 minutes to complete the hauls. During that time, their heroes can be challenged, and if they get defeated, the point is returned to the guild they were being stolen from.

Rewards

The rewards are based on guild level. 1,000 HBs are available per guild level. And 80 shards are available per guild level.

If your guild is, say, level 5, it would get 1,000 HBs * 5 or 5,000 HBs total if it scored maximum points. And it would also get 80 Shards * 5 or 400 Shards total if it scored maximum points. So scoring maximum points is a pretty big deal.

If your guild barely missed on maximum points, but still scored over 90% of the points, the rewards would still be good enough. Your guild would get about 75% of the maximum rewards.

But, if your guild scored less than 90% points, then the rewards would start to look very bad indeed.

Torch battles are important for the guilds so members have more Shards to donate to the guilds. With the donations the guilds can continue to advance level, and increase the possible rewards and the member count, while also being able to afford daily boss fights.

Hauling

When hauling, try not to target the top 10 guilds. One reason not to do so is that the top 10 guilds tend to be more active, they may have members watching more closely to guard and also have high level heroes that can safely beat other heroes if they try to haul from them. Another reason is that the top guilds are not fighting against one another for points, they just want to score 100% points and get their rewards. It doesn’t matter if they end up #1 or #20 on the ranking, as the rewards as not based on that. In fact, being #1 in torch battles ranking is bad because many other players from weaker guilds at least will try to haul from the #1.

At the end of the event, the more top guilds that have 100% scores, the better for the other ones also on 100% score, as they don’t need to worry as much about guarding. Guilds can only haul if they don’t have a 100% score, so the sooner things settle at the top the better everyone else will be.

Most people try to haul from weaker guilds who will not have high level heroes to be able to contest the hauls, even if they had members participating in the torch battles at the time.

During a haul, one just sends a hero not on cooldown and at the end of the time if the hero succeeds the guild scores another point. We don’t do anything else during a haul, we just send a hero to haul and now the only ones who get to do anything are the members of the guild being attacked. Our only feedback of the haul is whether our guild scored the point or not, although we can also filter the heroes that are still doing hauls by toggling the “Hauling” button of the Haul tab of the torch battles. We can see the haul timer of our heroes there. And we can see the haul counts of other guild members if they are doing hauls at the time.

Guarding

To guard one needs to check the Guard tab of torch battles. If enemies are coming, we may have just about 7 minutes to contest their heroes. Only during guarding do we see an actual battle as our heroes try to win against the heroes of others.

To better be able to guard, it’s a good idea to use a higher level hero that will have more stats than the enemy, giving your hero a better chance of succeeding. We can see the enemy hero type and their level before we try to contest them. If they are too high level for you, you could try asking for help from other guild members instead.

In fact, asking for help from others during guarding is as important as doing the fights yourself. Given how fast enemies can steal your points, the sooner you get others helping, the more chance you will have of blocking them.

Tries and hero cooldown

Both hauling and guarding have a maximum of 10 tries. We get another try point after 30 minutes. Once a hero is used for hauling or guarding, there is a cooldown of perhaps about 7 minutes, and the hero will only show up to be used again after that time.

The arena is a ladder system. It resembles what some tournaments do when they pitch players against one another to decide the winner. Like this:

The catch is that the arena is a live ranking, it never resets. What happens when we win against one of the 5 opponents presented as options for us to fight against is, if we win, we switch places with them. If my ranking was 1,400 and I beat the rank 1,200 opponent, now my rank will be 1,200 and my opponent’s will be 1,400. We switched our positions, and I can see at least one new opponent after the other ones that were next on the list.

To make us advance through the ranks faster, the arena presents opponents that are much farther ahead. So we don’t move 1 by 1, in general.

When we start at the arena, we may advance thousands of positions by beating an opponent. The arena starts to get serious at about rank 10,000. By then we may advance hundreds of positions by beating an opponent.

Between rank 3,000 and 1,000, if we win, we may advance at least 200 positions.

The number of positions we may advance by winning a fight at arena is variable. The closer to the top of the arena ranking we get, the fewer positions we may advance by winning. From 901 to 1000 we may advance at least 18 with a win. And from 801 to 900 we may advance just 16 with a win. You can refer to the wiki for the complete table of position changes with a win at arena: http://castle-clash.wikia.com/wiki/Arena (Click on Show of Advancing Steps to see it.)

What may be hard to understand is that we may keep seeing mostly the same opponents again and again at arena. The reason is that by winning and losing we just switch positions with the opponents. And the positions tend to be fixed, like I won I advanced 200 positions. I lost so I went back 200 positions. Ending up at the same place I was at before. It is as though we are at a bracket of that figure above. We mostly only fight against those in the same bracket as us. Sometimes we see new opponents as those that were behind advance, or those who were ahead start falling behind by being beaten by stronger players in the same bracket as us.

To make arena more exciting, sometimes players defend with weaker armies, inviting others to beat them, so when they fight at arena they have some weaker opponents they can beat. By doing this, we may be able to get more honor than by just holding onto the best position we can. If we put our strongest team to defend, some players may be scared of even trying to beat us, and may try to beat others instead. Also by winning more at arena we score points for the 1,000 arena wins achievement.

Finally, arena will always have opponents that are much more strong than us. One way to sort of game the arena system is by acquiring a lot of might, which gives us an advantage at arena by giving our heroes more stats buff, which may at least get us on the same foot as some of our opponents. The problem with this though is that by getting more might we may have a harder time in other parts of the game if our heroes are not actually strong enough yet.

So just relax. Do your best at arena. Work on improving your arena rank by just improving your team over time. The game is more fun outside arena. The arena is even very slow to load when fighting there. Hopefully the developers will one day fix it for us.

With gems we may be able to hire great heroes. But the actual hiring is entirely based on luck. We could get any number of elite and ordinary heroes, before we got a legendary hero. And the legendary hero could be anything, including a repeat or a hero we could have gotten with shards.

I hear that on the mobile platform the game may offer more free gems. I’m not sure though, since I don’t play it on mobile.

We get gems from these sources:

After maintenance, the game may award every player with at least 200 gems. We may get at least 1 maintenance per month.

Every day if we complete the daily quests, we may get 5 gems from 10 arena fights, 10 gems for looting a required amount of gold, and 10 gems if we loot the required amount of mana. 25 gems every day, for sure. :-)

Arena title like Cadet, Soldier, Squire… The title is based on might. The higher the might, the more gems we may get for free every day from it. Like so: 5, 8, 10, 12…

Daily login rewards. At least 20. Sometimes 50 and even 100.

Quests starting at town hall 7 may reward us with gems. Some quests may give 25 gems upon completion. And we can do 2 sets of quests per day. The higher the might, the more quests we can do, and the greater the chance we’ll have a gem rewarding quest.

Hero Trials challenges starting at 3,000 might also give a chance at a few to many gems. (Thx crossbone for the reminder.)

Achievements are a major source of gems at the beginning. Work on them as you play the game, but you don’t need to rush to get them all done. Not all of them can be completed in just a couple of months, mind you. :-)

One could also just buy gems with Kreds.

Ultimately, it’s not a given that gems will get people great heroes. It’s a lot of luck. At the beginning many players sacrifice builders that they could buy with gems for a chance to hire greater heroes. It’s tricky though, since we also need the builders going forward.

I think once people have enough heroes for the 5 hero bases, they should focus on getting more builders first, before trying to spend all their gems on heroes. Unless you are creating multiple accounts and risking to get a good hero before settling on a single account you will play forever with. Just 1 great hero can hardly change one’s luck in the game, although heroes like the Pumpkin Duke and Vlad Dracula get a lot of appreciation.

And if you still want those gems, you can just play the game and at least complete the daily quests if possible. Over time, you will get a lot of gems.

We get more resources by raiding other people than by collecting from mills and mines. :-)

In fact I am still playing with this same defense, only expanded it some:

The plan for now is to continue to use the same defense for a while. At least for Hero Trials and as a main defense.

Those who have tried to raid it often try to avoid my heroes, but still lose some of their heroes at the camps. It’s also a matter of not being used to such defenses, which can surprise them.

I feel some players try to avoid attacking this defense. For good reason though. Those who have tried to attack it have had a hard time getting 3 flames. Powerful heroes can themselves be threatened in case they end up facing my heroes.

For Hero Trials it has been a good defense too. While I advise to have the camps full to help to beat Hero Trials all the time, even when the camps weren’t as full I still beat the L3 challenges. I don’t even recall when it was the last time that I failed on a L3 Hero Trials defense. I stopped doing harder Hero Trial stages for now, though. The Grizzly Reapers and Cupids of L4 are just too strong. And I don’t see the point to losing Hero Trials defense just to try to beat some harder stages. I would rather win it 100% of the time.

Against raids, I am happy enough to give the attacker 1 or 2 gold vault(s) for 1 protection shield. I’m hoping the defense will continue to grow stronger, making it harder for attackers to get even 2 gold vaults. We’ll see. :-)

FAQ

Q. Aren’t you Estava too biased?

Yes. I’m biased. I don’t dispute that. I have used Griffins a million times and I love them. The Wiki of the game has stats of the troops if you want to check on just the stats: http://castle-clash.wikia.com/wiki/Troops

We can probably find a use for the different types of troops. But as a rule, Griffins should be standard to which all the other ones will be compared to.

At a latter stage of the game players seem to like to use no troops at all. But always try to keep some troops in your camps, or the Grizzly Reaper can just kill your heroes much quicker. And then the towers will be destroyed much easier.

Further Reference

I was trying to record some videos of attacking castles that had Centaurs defending them. I recorded several. But I just recorded one while raiding a friend here on Kongregate that shows well how Griffins can be integrated in the attack and how by the time some Griffins die it may already be too late for the defense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcHVYMxEcqo

Summary

I absolutely love the Griffins. I use them every time, whether defending or attacking. It’s hard for me to imagine using another troop, but while I wait, I have been training both Dragons and Ornithopters up to level 5 and upgrading the camps so I can host more of them at the same time.

When I’m defending, I like that the Griffins can try to outdamage enemy heroes that could be trying to heal or to build up energy for their skills. Their numbers can also serve as a buffer against enemy Grizzly Reaper so they cannot target my heroes just yet.

Like me, many other players have chosen the Griffin as their main troops. That’s why it’s perhaps the most popular troop we have.

I never stopped an attack because I saw the defense had Centaurs or Shotgun Dwarves, even though I was using Griffins. And when they tried to attack me with those, it often did not work either. Although level 5 Shotgun Dwarves may become an issue eventually. As the buildings get upgraded to level 16 and above, weaker troops cannot get past them quickly enough. So I have long stopped using Pyromancers, for example. And even the Griffins can suffer at times at the highest level dungeons.

You can try all the troops you want and see what works for you, to be sure. When my heroes were weaker, I appreciated what the troops could do for me. As a goal, you should try to get a good set of heroes up to level 120+ so you stop depending on troops so much. But the troops can help to increase the Damage per Second of our team, and the Griffins may be as good at that as any one of them.

Only 3 troops fly, for what it’s worth: Griffins, Dragons and Ornithopters. 1 Ornithopter though takes 12 housing space. Whereas a Griffin takes just 3. Those tier 3 troops may be more of a longer term investment and may only be mature to use after 4 or so months of playing the game.

Centaurs

The Centaurs are like the Griffins in that they are tier 2 troops. The branch of troops to which the Centaurs belong are faster to train than the branch of the troops of the Griffins. Training troops faster is definitely a welcome feature of Centaurs. But the branch of the Griffins gives more damage per unit instead. Whereas the branch of the Centaurs gives faster training time and more health per unit.

The Griffins and Dragons can fly, avoiding some of the dangers that will be unavoidable to Centaurs, such as walls, traps, Cannon towers and even the troops that cannot hit air units like the branch of Guardians and Treants and Mecha Men.

Centaurs will have to deal with those threats that hit ground troops, so the extra health is needed just to give the Centaurs an edge. While many player bases may not have a lot of Cannon towers and traps or even walls at all, Dungeons often have 4 Cannon towers and a lot of walls and troops in the camps that only hit ground units. I use a lot my Griffins at dungeons, since I attack dungeons dozens of times per day for the shards they give. I think Centaurs may have a problem at dungeons for that reason, compared to Griffins.

Shotgun Dwarves

On the branch of the Centaurs we have the Shotgun Dwarves. Their training time is pretty fast, perhaps about as fast as the Griffins. Only the Shotgun Dwarves are tier 3, and the Griffins are tier 2. Also the Shotgun Dwarves take more housing space than the Griffins and Centaurs.

The Shotgun Dwarves are a very natural upgrade from the Centaurs. Even a level 1 Shotgun Dwarf is already comparable to a level 5 Centaurs. Perhaps not on damage per unit, but by having more health than the Centaur.

Many players go the route of the Centaurs because at the end of it they will get the nice Shotgun Dwarves. The Shotgun Dwarves train faster than the Dragons, and unlike the Dragons that have to compete with the Griffins for usage, the Shotgun Dwarves are a safe bet in comparison to most other units.

Some of the downsides to the Shotgun Dwarves come just from being able to house fewer of them and enemy heroes may also make quick work of them and even heal up from dealing damage to them.

Defense troops

Many people say that the troops like the Centaurs are better for defense than the Griffins. Perhaps because they have more health. But as we have seen above, it’s not exactly clear. Enemy heroes can heal up by targeting higher health troops. Also the fewer troops we have in the camps, the sooner the enemy Reaper may start targeting our heroes.

Perhaps at the very beginning troops that have more health can tank some enemy heroes. But later on, as heroes start to get to level 120, they can even one-shot those troops whether they have 1k health or 2.5k health.

Some of the argument may be “but what if we put 1 Griffin against 1 Centaur, who would win?” Well, it doesn’t work like that. By the time Centaurs or Shotgun Dwarves may have a chance to kill some Griffins, most of the base defense may have already been gone and it may be in the final seconds of being leveled, whether some Griffins get killed or not.

High Damage Griffins

Griffins have very high damage per unit. Griffins level 5 are the standard of damage troops. Only Dragons level 5 seem to really beat them on damage per unit. But Dragons level 5 take forever to research. And since Dragons occupy 5 housing space whereas Griffins occupy just 3 per troop, and also each Dragon takes much longer to train than a Griffin, it’s a very costly transition to make. All because Dragons have more health than the Griffins.

I have Dragons level 3 researched, and I have yet to feel the need to use Dragons. I would rather use them once they were level 5. They are very comparable to Griffins. Both fly. One also needs to be careful when using them not to lose them all, so the way they operate is very similar to what I described about the Griffins above. For instance, one needs to be careful not to mess up the spells.

The way I see Dragons is that they could eventually be useful, mostly when they are level 5 and the Army Camps are upgraded to near max. So they can fit more Dragons at the same time. Except that by having more health, Dragons can also allow for an enemy Grizzly Reaper to regain more health when attacking them with the skill.

The Grizzly Reaper gains health of 15% of the damage done with the skill, first to troops and then to enemy heroes. It’s not a lot, but higher health troops can allow for the Reaper to regain more health as a result. I’m at the moment upgrading the skill of my Reaper to level 7, which will allow him to target 5 troops or heroes at a time. At skill level 5, the Reaper can only target 4 enemies at a time. Newer heroes like the Dracula who also regain health based on the damage they deal may prefer to target higher health troops as a result. Orksbane is another one.

Plus, as it regards the Grizzly Reaper, the sooner the troops are gone from the camps, the sooner the Reaper can start targeting the enemy heroes instead. So by having fewer troops in the camps because they require more housing space per unit, we may be aiding the desire of the Reaper to target the enemy heroes sooner.

It’s a discussion we always have. Should I upgrade Griffins or Centaurs?

Well, when I was starting out, I first researched a little. Some players said Griffins were very good and likely all we really needed in the game. It is not just a matter of saying that Griffins were better, it’s also the depth of saying that Griffins were likely all we really needed that caught my eyes. How come? What about Dragons and Ornithopters and…

Even after I first trained my Griffins, I didn’t start using them right away. I was plenty happy with using Pyromancers level 5. I waited till my Griffins were level 5 to make the transition.

The first time I used Griffins level 1 I was rather impressed. They seemed very good, but at the time my heroes were really underpowered. I was using some elite heroes level 40 still, most likely. Angel level 60 too. So my heroes couldn’t really help the Griffins much. Without the heroes around, the Griffins would die and then I would need to retrain them which would take 3 minutes per Griffin… A lot longer than waiting less than 1 minute for a Pyromancer.

So, I compared Griffins to heroes. They were almost like heroes, being first to battle by flying over walls and on direct routes to their targets, nevermind the threats along the way. But they still weren’t strong enough… It all changed when I got them to level 5. Now they became stronger, and I finally had some better heroes to go along with them.

Low Health Griffins

While Griffins have low health, it often doesn’t matter too much, since heroes can tank for them. Towers in fact seem to prefer to target heroes anyway. So Griffins are spared and can do their job of adding more Damage per Second to the team.

With Pyromancers, since they retrained so quickly, I could start a fight by just sacrificing the Pyromancers ahead of launching my heroes. Against higher level buildings, they started to underperform. So Griffins really changed things around. With Griffins, I started launching the heroes first, and then the Griffins came soon after them. Until I started using spells a lot more.

Spells

With spells, if the Griffins are grouped up with the heroes, it can mess up the spells like the Restoration and Guardian Angel. It’s a good idea to use those spells only when the heroes are by themselves, mostly. So launching the heroes first and perhaps waiting a while to drop the Griffins was a good idea.

Sometimes I follow the heroes with 1 to a few Griffins depending on the needs. That doesn’t complicate the spells too much. And 1 Griffin alongside the heroes can enjoy the spells without messing them up, since the spell can target 6 units. Which means 5 heroes and 1 troop is fine.

Most of us will never get some of the really good heroes. Heroes like the Pumpkin Duke, Vlad Dracula, Orksbane, Cupid, etc may be too hard to get. The odds you or I will get one is less than 1%, I’m afraid. My last 9 × 450 gem rolls didn’t give me any legendary hero, for example. But over the time we may play this game, we’ll have many chances to get at least one of those hard to get heroes. At some point we may hire 1, 2 or even 3 of them… Even then we may miss an important hero like the Pumpkin Duke or some other more powerful hero like the Orksbane.

Some game modes may only be doable with a certain hero. We hear for example like the MESA game mode which is not yet available on our servers makes having the Pumpkin Duke a must, since even level 160+ heroes can’t beat it without the support of Pumpkin Dukes…

In a way I am happy that we don’t have the MESA yet, since I don’t have a Pumpkin Duke and I don’t want other players to also feel like they are missing out on the fun… But it will come eventually.

Players who won the lottery and have already hired some of those special heroes may be more outspoken. And other players who know they are missing out on those heroes may become sad, after months of playing the game without yet being able to scream “I Won!” by just hiring one of those unique heroes.

The game is what we make of it to some extent. A 1% chance to hire a hero is a very small chance at happiness, if that’s how we define happiness. We should be happy for other players who have already scored big. And just carry on with our “bad luck”, as the system is heavily stacked against us anyway.

Many games have adopted these systems that introduce luck, which resembles a kind of gambling… 100 people give it a try, and only 1 person gets lucky at the end of it by winning the lottery. One person could try it 100 times as much and still not get lucky. It can be painful.

Many of us take joy in being “free-to-play” players. But some of us free-to-play players get more lucky than others. Some free-to-play players will hire a Pumpkin Duke and from then on will be king of the free-to-play players. We should be happy for them. After all, even those players who pay a lot of money may miss out on their Pumpkin Dukes.

Each one of us should recognize when we get lucky. Maybe one of us got a good hero with a great talent. Maybe one of us got a lot of free time to play a game like this one. Maybe one of us managed to get all the heroes we could buy with shards and just want to build up our castle for the next many months…

There is no pressure, beside the pressure we put on ourselves as a community.

Let’s just enjoy the moment, play the game as much as we want to. And maybe watch some movies and play other games as well.

Luckily this isn’t a sport. We don’t have to beat others. We can just have some fun instead. We don’t need to compete at the rankings. We can let others have the high might they want. Whatever. :-)

The Mantis design I created proved to be good enough, so I continued to iterate on it and ended up with this new design I called Conus. The idea is about the same of the Mantis design. Corner bases with central heroes.

Some people have tried to attack this one. A couple destroyed about 80% which was enough to put the castle into a shield. Today one attacked it and destroyed just 32% without even looting a single gold vault, apparently.

While I cannot generally see the battle replays, I can imagine what went on and use clues like traps used to know where the heroes came from. The attackers seem to prefer to attack the camps and towers first.

For Hero Trials, one change I made since the Mantis design was to put 2 other camps right at the side instead of having them more to the center like they originally were. With the camps more to the side the troops can more easily deal with enemies that spawned right at that side by teaming up against them.

I also pulled back buildings that were making more of a ring of buildings around the heroes. I found them slightly unnecessary since they were even giving enemies like the cupids more time to buff up before getting to the heroes inside. I still maintain 2 buildings at the top and bottom corners, the ones with least HP that serve as just early or late baits: The Training Hall and the Warehouse. Also since I hardly click on them they don’t need to be visible all of the time, so they can be placed further away. :-)

Since I use this design as my main design as well, I need the buildings that I click the most on, like the Relic Hall, Hero Altar, Arena and Guild Hall to be easily visible and clickable to avoid scrolling around for them. I like how I can see nearly everything on the default view screen.

I have now stopped trying to farm L4 of Hero Trials. The Cupids and Grizzly Reapers were nearly unstoppable there. I lost 5 times to them before I gave up. I’m now only farming L3, which I think I can beat all the time. I beat the Cupids of L3 yesterday. They are considerably much weaker, thank goodness.

If I don’t see a reason to change, I may keep this design as my main one for a while. One way to easily improve it is just to work on more garrison heroes. :-)

For instance, my level 87 Atlanticore with skill level 5 made for purple garrison level 3 on one of the towers. Very handy for now.

I also have a design I use for HBM which I have found to be successful enough so I switch between them when needed.

Cheers.

P.S. One of the advantages of a proper Hero Trials design like mine may just be that the troops in the camps have a chance to survive it. LOL. Most of my troops always survive it.

Notice how my defense melts in a couple of seconds. My heroes barely manage a couple of shots out before they die, and my heroes are above level 120 mostly. My towers too melt in a couple of seconds each and they are level 8 with some garrison.

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